Personal Info
- Country of residence: Palestine
Information
Abdul Aziz Ali Shaheen, known as “Abu Ali Shaheen”, was born in the depopulated village of Bashit, Ramla district, occupied in 1941. He studied the primary stage in UNRWA schools in Rafah, and the secondary stage in government schools in Khan Yunis, from which he obtained his high school diploma in 1960. He worked in Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
He joined the Fatah movement in Qatar in 1962, became active in its ranks, and underwent a military course at the Al-Hama camp in Syria. He then secretly moved to Palestine and participated in forming the first military cells of Fatah in the occupied territories after the June 1967 war in several areas, including Nablus, Hebron, and cities within the occupied Palestinian interior. He was one of the first leaders of the Palestinian prisoner movement and one of the first to plan and carry out hunger strikes inside the occupation prisons. He was one of the founders of the Fatah Youth Movement, the student arm of Fatah in universities and schools in 1982, and one of those who worked in the Western Sector, where he was entrusted with the responsibility of the Western Sector Commission between (1985-1986). He was also appointed Secretary of the Palestinian Leadership in Lebanon between (1986-1987). He returned to work in the Western Sector again during his stay in Tunisia, where he was responsible for the Gaza Strip between (1988-1993). He was elected as a member of the Fatah Revolutionary Council at the Fifth Conference in 1989.
He returned to Palestine in 1995, and became a member of the Higher Reference Committee of Fatah in the Gaza Strip between (1995-2005), a member of the first Legislative Council (1996-2006), a member of the National Council (1996-2006), and Minister of Supply (1996-2003).
Shaheen suffered from the policies of the occupation; he was arrested by its intelligence in 1967 and sentenced to fifteen years in prison, of which he spent twelve years in solitary confinement. The occupation imposed house arrest on him in his home in the Tel al-Sultan camp in Rafah between (1982-1983), and obliged him to come daily to the police headquarters from ten in the morning and then two in the afternoon. Then a decision was issued to exile him to the Dahiniya area in Sinai between (1983-1985). Then the Zionist Supreme Court issued a decision to deport him to southern Lebanon in 1985. Then he was arrested in Jordan in 1986, and the Jordanian authorities deported him to Iraq. The occupation forces demolished his house in 2004.
Shaheen died at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City on May 28, 2013, after a struggle with illness, and was buried in Rafah.
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